2 week old chicks in tractor on grass, no medication

Just an update. The chicks have just turned 2 weeks of age and I made them a new tractor to celebrate.
This is their first move out of the miniature wire brooder, which they were outgrowing. It's also their first time on the ground, though of course they've been on a floor containing a small amount of healthy adult hen droppings.

Their diet is the same as last time I talked about these birds.

So here they are in the new tractor, complete with hose-covered wire handles for dragging. It's basically a miniature replica of my huge tractor. This one is about 600mm x 1100mm, so it isn't very big, but quite sufficient for either a hen with babies or a dozen or more chicks on their own.

The structure is basically made of Bunnings compost panels (this whole unit took a single pack, plus one offcut from last pack; I could have done without that though).

Two panels were bent to form a semicircle when clipped together with c-clips up the spine (which is the top middle of the curve). Another panel was halved and c-clipped to the curve to lengthen it and make it even bigger. To keep them in this U shape (when seen in profile) the ends were then c-clipped to cut-out sections of panel. The front opening (to the right in this picture) has a lower section that doesn't open, so chicks don't come flying out all at once when I change food and water.

Over the top of the compost panels, once they were fairly rigidly clipped together, I then added a layer of bird mesh. It's not the really good stuff (which has square holes) because the compost panels provide security against big predators and little ones find any sort of small-holed mesh a challenge. With a good dog in the backyard I tend to focus on slowing predators down rather than building Fort Knox. Even so it wouldn't be easy for a fox to get at these chicks through the wire.

The unit is also pegged to the ground in 5 places. Yes, an animal could dig underneath. But again that's something that takes time to do, and my dog is very alert. If this unit was to be used away from the house I'd perhaps think about adding a mesh skirt around the outside. At any rate the tent pegs keep it from being lifted up.

Over the unit, as you can see, there are some small tarps (folded in half and fitted around the curve) and some offcuts of shadecloth to stop currawongs herding the chicks from one side to the other and pecking their eyes.

The feeder (attached to the front of the cage so it moves with it) is a piece of drainpipe slit lengthwise. This is set in at a slight slope so water tends to drain away, though practically speaking the tractor is never really on level ground anyhow.

The chicks are really enjoying the mixture of grass, sunshine and a generous long feeder.

Now for the simplest part of all. You can see I'm using a cat carrier as the cold brooder in this setup. That's because it's summer right now and although it's an unusually cold summer (current temperature 22C, last night down to about 18C) the chicks are doing perfectly with an open fronted sleeping area. They've been trained already to go into an insulated nest at night or when cold.

The cat carrier isn't just bare, of course. The floor is 2 layers of foam insulation. The walls and ceiling are a rectangle of the same insulating foam (camp/yoga matting) cut to size then bent into a curve that hugs the structure above and on the sides. The pressure of the foam wanting to turn into a rectangle again keeps it pressed against the walls. With another piece of foam at the rear, tucked behind the curved piece, and some loose wool (from my pet sheep) stuffed into the cavity between foam and cat carrier plastic ceiling, the little space is truly cosy. Lastly I've inserted a couple of pieces of packing foam across the front, as an extra heat retainer.

These chicks know where to go because they've been largely cold brooded (after being trained to use the insulated nest area in the first place by a ceramic bulb). They're largely self sustaining now. About 6 days ago I sold 5, so these remaining 10 birds are doing all the work at staying warm.

At 2 weeks of age you can see they are remarkably well feathered. Largely this is genetic (the red hybrid and leghorn parents are both early maturing) but partly it's because they've been asked to do some of the insulating themselves.

Of course coccidiosis is always a worry, but these birds are on the kefir diet and I'm not expecting to see any setbacks. They've had the usual regime of a handful of hen soil sprinkled through the litter from day one, and being moved from the starter-brooder before 3 weeks of age. However the grass under them is damp and it's been raining off and on for a couple of weeks now, so I'll be watching them closely. This is their second day on the ground so we'll see by day 5 whether I'll need to make any changes.

But I don't think I'll see a problem. :)

home made chick feed

These chicks are a week old and haven't eaten any commercial feed. My feeding regime is quite simple: after mixing up the adult hens' feed (sprouts, kefir, lucerne chaff, soy meal non GMO, seaweed, oyster shell, salt) I usually have a little too much. I add extra soy meal and also extra kefir, whiz it up in the food processor and that's my chick feed. The wheat sprouts are thus growing right up until the point of consumption by the chicks. Because they're sprouted the wheat kernels are soft and whiz up to a crumble very easily.

The amount of oyster shell in the base feed is only 1.5%. It's too low for the layers, but they have shell grit available in their pens all the time. Thus I'm not harming the chicks with too high calcium.

At the moment they're in the cold brooder (the one made entirely of wire). I was planning to slip these birds under a broody hen, but unfortunately due to a domestic disaster I gave away all my hens. I was going to give away all the chickens but things calmed down. Ultimately it makes no sense to pay $5 for stale supermarket 'free range' eggs if I can get better eggs in the backyard at lower cost, with just a little effort.

Having switched my children's diet to one containing more vegetables and less refined carbohydrates, I'm also happy to feed scraps to these birds. The kinds of scraps I'm talking about are vegetable/egg patties, mince patties, home grown greens and so forth. My dog is already thriving on scraps (with extra bones, meat, liver, etc) and her severe flea allergy of two years ago entirely disappeared when I took her off commercial dry food, so I know what a difference it makes to use fresh food.

The one thing I'm really learning as I make these big shifts (from industry-processed to home-processed; from fillers to fresh) is that feeding even very young chicks doesn't have to be a science. As long as the basics of both human and animal diets are richly varied, fresh and/or made into living foods with additions like probiotics (lactobacilli from kefir, for instance) there's a lot of room to vary. Of course, there are some crucial things to understand such as what range of seeds and feeds will provide the complete range of vitamins (you can't for instance just feed wheat and linseed/flax), but again there's no need to be out there with measuring cups and scales every day. Sprouted wheat, corn and peas, lucerne (alfalfa) meal or chaff, non GMO soy meal, sunflower seeds (ground for chicks, whole for adults), kefir, fresh greens: these can be used to make a whole feed at home.

The chicks are eating a ground crumble of about 60% sprouted wheat, 6% sprouted corn, 4% sprouted peas, 4% sunflower, 20% non GMO soy meal, and 6% lucerne chaff. That's the dry basis. To this I add about a cupful of kefir made from powdered skim milk, and of course a pinch of seaweed meal per 10 chicks, and a very small pinch of salt. Then of an afternoon I add finely chopped grass, chickweed, dandelion, spinach or other greens. As soon as they're out of this small brooder and on grass, I won't need to chop greens for them.

This is the same diet as the adults, except that the bigger birds' soy meal and kefir amounts are lower, and I'll usually increase the calcium by adding more shell grit to the bucket just before putting it in their feeding troughs.

When soy meal in this country goes the way of US soy (almost entirely GM) I'll of course be changing the feeds and probably going back to using meat meal. I might even find a way to buy fish meal, perhaps by forming a co-op with other home feeding chicken keepers to buy bulk amounts. Or I might do more gathering of protein around the backyard, e.g. by laying out carpets on top of grass and scraps to draw worms underneath, harvesting them of a morning.

Growing birds on home diet

The above birds are 9 and 10 weeks old. All seem to be at an appropriate size and weight for age, with the exception of the leghorn x meat hybrids, which are obviously much larger. The black mottled birds are a lot calmer than purebred anconas, and I'm happy with their overall style, vigour and health. They're currently in with two commercial feed store pullets, both of which have just started to lay. Because I joined the groups only after a couple weeks' getting to know each other through an adjoining fence -- also because all birds are fairly young, and the introduced chicks are in a larger flock than the 2 individual older birds -- there have been absolutely no incidences of aggression, or even much if any pecking-order hassles. This surprised me as one of the older pullets is an ISA brown, notorious for brutality.

Diet I'm using for these birds now consists of sprouted wheat, bran, pollard, soy meal, sprouted corn, sprouted peas, lucerne (alfalfa) chaff, sunflower seeds, skim milk kefir, seaweed meal and salt. Earlier they had ground and then cracked wheat, corn and peas, but I've slowly introduced sprouted grains instead, so I'm no longer adding much in the way of bran or pollard. Whole sprouted wheat is a far better feed than any processed wheat product. However I'll be watching their weight to make sure withdrawing bran and pollard doesn't cause a setback (which it may do if the birds' gizzards are not able to handle larger seeds, even when they've been soaked or sprouted). An ongoing project...

The big fellow standing on the stump is a couple of days shy of 10 weeks, and is massive without being overly heavy for his age. He's able to get up and down via the ladder-ramp (bottom right corner), which leads up into the night shed, and has no problem alighting from the perch. Of course he may get too heavy for that, so I'll keep a close eye on his weight and decide if and when I need to find some other night shed for him.

goshawk protection

It's not just actual attacks that harm chickens; fear and stress stop the birds eating and can open the door to other problems. Unfortunately the goshawks in this area have a penchant for harassing my birds even with the pens fully netted. Indeed yesterday the goshawk didn't fly away until I was about ten feet from it. The chickens were almost injuring themselves trying to hide.

I realised it was time to give them some extra cover. So I wheeled the ancient barrow into the pen, and also rigged up a corrugated iron-roofed shelter using some cut pine logs and 2 spare planks. The roof is screwed onto the planks, which are long-nailed into the stumps; it's not going anywhere.

While it took the birds a while to get comfortable with the new arrangement, they were soon happily perching on top of the obstacles and also checking out the under-side. If the goshawk comes back, at least the birds will have a visual barrier between themselves and the eye of doom. As for the goshawks, they'll never leave the pens completely alone. But at the moment, as long as the netting stays intact, they can't get in, and even if something tears a hole in the netting the birds have got some chance of evading the talons.

I don't know if these things would work on free range, but it seems to me a goshawk would have a lot of trouble chasing prey under a low roof. If I ever free range again, that's what I'll do.

Removal of right to grow food, coming to a country near you!

New Zealand has apparently passed a law relating to food which is of great interest to anyone growing their own (whether meat or vegetables or anything medicinal). The link below explains how the law makes it a state-granted privilege, not a right, to grow and trade (or swap) seeds and food.

http://nzfoodsecurity.org/

Such laws will happen here in Australia too, but it's arguable that they're designed purely to enhance the interests of big multinational corporations like Monsanto. It's very hard to see how they could enhance the interests of a population subject to the laws. Indeed, if food safety really is the issue, why is the distribution of seeds subject to the new law?

There's not much point feeling sorry for New Zealanders because it's merely a matter of time before the laws are introduced here. If gun-toting police can raid an organic shop in New Zealand, rest assured, they will eventually be able to raid a chicken breeder's backyard under similar laws here.

Ever since the 1990s corporations have been among the top ten global economies. They have revolving door access to governments, and as the Kevin Rudd issue shows (deposed by mining corporation pressure through media influence) they can effect regime change. I shouldn't be surprised by the extent of corporate power over lawmaking, but I can't help feeling depressed by the speed with which our global landscape is being incorporated.

Most frighteningly, the drive for profit has no boundary, no upper-end. There's never a point where corporations say 'enough' -- just look at battery chickens. Corporations aren't happy enough with seven week broilers; they're constantly looking for ways to make the process cheaper and shorter. They're genetically modifying broilers as we speak. So rest assured, we haven't seen the last of the encroachments on our age-old human rights... After all, to a mega-corporation obsessed with profit, what's the difference between a battery hen and a human being?

update: 8 weeks, no cocci medication, all well

Last post for the day (I think...), here are the growing chicks, doing well in their pen:

Apologies for a blurry photo, but you can see the amazing difference in size between the meat hybrid x leghorns and the other crosses (which are ancona x red layer).

As you can see too, despite the cull of 13 males I still have many cockerels to choose from. There's no hurry to sort these into keepers and table birds as it will be some time before they're crowing with sufficient volume to bother anyone, and the pen is far from overcrowded (though it is a little denuded of green stuff).

For me the best thing is that none is showing signs of coccidiosis or other health setback. No medication since week 1, no special treatment after being put in the pen (beyond continued soured skim milk), I'm happy with that.

raised on home mix since week 5...

This bird is one of the feed store pullets bought at about 3 weeks of age. She was weaned off commercial starter onto my home mix by about week 5, and here she is now just short of week 17.

I'm pleased with her growth, and pleased too with the evidence of her being very close to starting to lay. Nutritional issues often show up as a failure to begin laying on time. I think this suggests that the home mix (remember, these birds don't free range) is doing what it should do.

In case this sounds like bragging, I've made many mistakes in the past, and keeping a record in the blog lets me review things as I go. But for now, all seems good.

easy peasy sprouting for chickens

Sprouting is easy!

All you need are a very large bucket (20 L for instance), a circular piece of shadecloth about 80cm in diameter, about 10 narrow cable ties, some whipper snipper cord or thin rope, and a hook for hanging.

One way to make a hangable bag is to take the circular shadecloth and insert a cable tie every so often until they go right around the circle, evenly spaced. Leave a good inch or more between where you insert the tie and the shadecloth edge. Only do up each cable tie enough to form a generous hoop. If you insert whipper snipper cord or rope through the cable ties you have an instant drawstring bag, which you can hang or close over the bucket during draining.

Another way is to simply insert whipper snipper cord through the circular shadecloth near the edges, knotting it just tight enough to allow it to open over the bucket (for up-ending). When hung from hooks the drawstring naturally pulls tight:

The process is quite simple. First the grains are soaked for 24 hours, at a ratio of a quarter-bucket of grains to three-quarters water. If you try to increase the grain-to-water ratio you may see some fermentation on a warm day (which you don't want).

Secondly after 24 hours' soaking you want to drain the grains into your shadecloth bag. You can either tip them onto the outspread shadecloth or gather the shadecloth about the bucket top and up-end the whole thing.

Gather the loops over a hook and hang this newly-formed bag. Every day in passing you should give the bag a jostle to make sure the grains are not clumping together (if they do this too much you may get pockets of souring/mould), and you should also give them a rinse by either dunking the bag in water or giving them a good spray with a hose.

You can use the soaked grain on that first day, and every day after that for about 3 or 4 days you can feed the sprouting seeds. By day 4 I find that the sprouts are getting pretty lengthy, so I mostly feed them out by day 3.

Of course, you could always keep two hanging bags at different stages of sprouting, if you want to aim for the maximum nutrition (when sprout tails are about 1cm long). But I seem to get good bird health results feeding anywhere between days 1 and 4.

This is a terrific way to ensure a constant supply of sprouting grains, and do I need to add that sprouting enhances the availability of vitamins to birds, and makes the grains more digestible?

What better way to avoid artificial vitamins in feed? Sprouting rules!

fake eggs

I'm absolutely done with plastic fake eggs! This is the fifth or sixth time I've had to replace them.

The trouble with plastic fake eggs is that bush rats try to eat them by opening the end, just as they do with real eggs. Net result: chewed up half-eggs. Even if they don't make a huge hole, they take them away from the nest, and eventually all my plastic eggs disappear.

To teach hens where to lay, some people use golf balls, but they're not much more durable than plastic eggs, and they don't fool 100% of hens when it comes to setting a broody.

At the moment I've got a broody hen I want to move to a ratproof aviary, and she's so fussy I know she won't sit on golf balls.

Ceramic eggs are ideal, but aren't that easy to find.

That's why I've made these:

They're a bit rough round the edges, but only took 10 fiddly minutes to make, and cost about 20c each (that being the amount of plaster-of-paris I used from a $4 bag).

I simply took 4 eggs and chipped a 1cm hole in the fat end with a sharp knifepoint. Then I drained out the contents after a quick swizzle with a skewer to break up the yolk. (The contents became scrambled eggs.)

After rinsing the insides out fully, I left the shells to drain in egg cups while mixing up the plaster. I made it about the consistency of custard and syringed it into each cleaned-out eggshell using a 10ml syringe (20 or 50ml would have been easier). After a few shakes to dislodge air bubbles I sat each egg hole-upward in an egg carton, topping up with a little extra plaster-of-paris as the stuff began to set (as plaster sets in a mould it tends to sink a little).

When all eggs had hardened I sanded off excess plaster and painted the eggs with some leftover house acrylic (which usefully enough was beige).

There are a few rough spots, and if I cared enough I'd give them another acrylic coat, but I think these will do. They'll behave and feel like eggs to a hen, and a few smudges will merely look like nest grime.

As plaster eggs are porous, they may need repainting to remove mould spots in future. And of course rats may still have the odd experimental nibble. But with four fifths of a bag of plaster left I can always make more.

petit poussins: processing young chicks

I was feeling quite the failure for deciding to dispatch the majority of my ancona x cockerels at 6 weeks of age instead of waiting for them to reach maturity. One of the main reasons to do all this has always been humanitarian, and there's no doubt that killing one animal to feed a whole family is better than killing one animal each.

But there were some important management considerations such as crowding and aggression, and overcrowding is almost certainly going to lead to higher cocci oocyst numbers in the pen. As well, I was facing a time of extra difficulty getting 'farm' work done while a few other things intervened. Since I'm the only chicken fancier in the household, I had to move.

So into the freezer they went, 13 well grown but very young birds. It took me an hour to do the whole job, clean up, get back inside, have a shower and greet some guests. I won't say it was an easy hour.

I was a little surprised (and less guilty) later to come across a reference to 'petit poussins' in an old chicken keeping handbook. Apparently they were dispatched at about the 6-8 week mark and sold for eating. What they lacked in size they obviously made up for in tenderness.

While I still feel guilty processing such young birds, I'm a little glad that I'm not the only person in the world to have dispatched birds at this age for economic as well as practical reasons. And while the 'better than being minced alive at day old' or 'it's still older than a commercial meat hybrid' argument might not be much to justify a practice on, the chicks are certainly not being wasted.

It seems these petit poussins have their place, if baby birds must be removed for practical reasons. And I for one can't bring myself to dispatch at day old.